Bryant: Rickey Henderson wasn’t as good as he says he was — he was better
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Howard Bryant, Columnist, ESPN.com
Before he was a somebody, Rickey Henderson was already a constituency of one.
Professional athletes are a different species, world-class talents whose sense of self and possibility do not often fit within the confines of the doubts and fears natural to the rest of us. But Rickey, the physical specimen who thought he could play baseball forever before he died at 65 on Friday night in Oakland, California, from complications with pneumonia and asthma, stood even beyond his most gilded peers on the confidence scale.
I once asked him when he knew he had the talent to play Major League Baseball, to be on the same field with Reggie Jackson and Nolan Ryan, to play the same game Willie Mays and Henry Aaron played. To live at the altitude of the gods. As easily as telling the time, Rickey answered, “I don’t know. Somewhere between fifth and sixth grade.”
When Henderson was a 10th grader at Oakland Technical High School, his new baseball coach, Bob Cryer, fanned the players out and pointed to those he wanted to report to the varsity and then junior varsity. Rickey was sent to the JV. The other kids protested, tried to tell the coach that Rickey, who might have looked smaller than everyone else, was a legend. The kids told the coach he was making a mistake.
Taking matters into his own hands, Rickey walked up to the new coach and said, “You must not know who I am.”
After he was a somebody, everybody knew who Rickey Henderson was. Start with the name. A one-namer. That meant he was a star. Ubiquitous. Baseball used to have one-namers — Ruth, Reggie, Willie, Pete, Rickey — now it’s so desperate for a show-stopper like them, the league is likely to put a security detail on Shohei Ohtani.
When it was done, Rickey had finished a 24-year career having scored more runs, stolen more bases, hit more home runs to lead off a game and drawn more walks than anyone who ever played. He had fulfilled his own prophecy to be one of the best who ever did it, the greatest ever when it came to hitting first and stealing bases.
We protect our own time, and for those who saw him, Rickey Henderson spanned time, from the early days when he and Billy Martin resurrected the A’s and put Rickey on the map, to the days when his iconoclasm chafed the old guard so much that many did not think he was the automatic Hall of Famer he would one day become.
Rickey amassed a career so big it was impossible to not concede that he knew what he was doing all along. The stories that were once proof that he was bad for the game became the nostalgia we missed, the personality we craved. His personality hadn’t necessarily changed; the numbers were simply too big to dispute. He wasn’t as good as he said he was. He was actually better.
Buck Showalter recalled a game in the early 1990s when the New York Yankees were in Oakland. Showalter was a coach on the Yankees’ staff, and late in the game, the manager was giving out instructions.
“Rickey was hitting against us, and he has us playing no-doubles defense,” Showalter said. “Guarding the lines. Don’t give up anything big. Don’t let him get in scoring position. Then Mattingly turns around and yells into the dugout, ‘What for? If he gets a single, it’s a double anyway!‘”
Wherever you look in baseball, there is Rickey. When you see Kyle Schwarber and Ohtani and Aaron Judge hitting leadoff, you see Rickey: It is because no true leadoff hitter has ever been able to replicate his power that the sport has resorted to letting cleanup hitters start the game.
When baseball laments its lack of action, capitulates to the truth that dry, analytical no-risk baseball has been a failure by enlarging the bases and just giving stolen bases away, you see Rickey, for there was nothing like Rickey leading off, stalking the pitcher, prowling … and attacking.
No one loved Rickey more than the analytics guys, because Rickey did everything they want, with a video-game efficiency.
Get on base more than 40 percent of the time? Check.
Hit for average? Check.
Hit for power? Check.
Hit for leadoff power? Double-check.
Steal bases at an 85 percent success rate? Check.
As a baseball player, Rickey was everything in one. As the analytics godfather Bill James once said, “If you cut Rickey Henderson in half, you’d have two Hall of Famers.”
There were so many moments. There was 1982, when Rickey shattered Lou Brock’s single-season record of 118 stolen bases with 130. There was his first season with the Yankees in 1985, when he scored 146 runs and believes he was robbed of the MVP. There was 1990, the year Rickey did win the MVP.
But his Mount Everest for me was the 1989 postseason, starting with the American League Championship Series destruction of Toronto in which he hit .400 with two home runs and scored eight runs in five games to earn series MVP. Rickey followed it up with a World Series in which he hit .474 as the A’s swept the San Francisco Giants.
Over those nine games, Rickey went 15-for-34, scored 12 runs, hit three home runs, walked nine times (with only two strikeouts) and stole 11 of 12 bases. The numbers were impressive but the value was in Rickey proving, at long last, that he was a championship-level ballplayer, a winning ballplayer. As remarkable as it sounds, there was once a belief in the game that Rickey did not always make a team better. The 1989 playoffs erased any doubt that Rickey was one of the great impact players of his time.
His toughness had always been underrated, and that toughness destroyed the Blue Jays. It was what his Oakland teammate Dennis Eckersley said made him so dangerous. He could not be intimidated.
It reminded me of the time Rickey and I were sitting in the dugout in spring training in Mesa, Arizona, talking about competition and he suddenly said, “Did I ever tell you the time I punched Richard Dotson in the face?”
The date was Sept. 10, 1984, A’s-White Sox at the Oakland Coliseum. Dotson was a serviceable major league pitcher for the better part of his 12-year career, mostly with the White Sox. He even won 22 games in 1983 and finished fourth on the Cy Young ballot. In the summer of 1984, he made his first and only All-Star team, on which he and Rickey were teammates.
But later that season, neither team was going anywhere. In the bottom of the first, Dotson starts Rickey off with a fastball … right under his chin, dropping him to one knee. Rickey eventually flies out to right, but not before Dotson throws another one near his cheekbone.
“Next time up,” Rickey says, “I’m standing two steps in front of the plate, damn near standing on the plate, begging this Mother Hubbard to hit me. So he throws four balls way, way outside. OK, I take my walk, but I’m not jogging to first base. I’m strolling to first. I’m jangling to first. I’m taking my sweet time to first. Then I take off for second. Boom. Steal second.”
Rickey is on second in the bottom of the third with one out, and Dotson is angry. Rickey stretches out, like he’s about to take third. Dotson is so worried about Rickey, he walks Dwayne Murphy.
With Dotson facing Dave Kingman, the giant slugger who never took a check swing in his life, Rickey taunts him, threatening to steal third. Kingman takes two enormous hacks; insulted, Dotson drills Kingman with a fastball to the body. Rickey is watching the whole thing from second base.
“Dave walks to first. Everything’s cool — and then he jets to the mound and punches Dotson. Just unloads on him. Now everybody coming off the bench. Both benches. And here we go. I’m on second base and I come in flying and BOOM! I pop Dotson right in his face.”
Home plate umpire Vic Voltaggio ejects Kingman. (Rickey got free punches on Dotson; Voltaggio doesn’t toss him.) White Sox manager Tony La Russa, leaves Dotson in the game. First pissed, now punched, Dotson walks Bruce Bochte, scoring Rickey for the only run of the game. The A’s win 1-0, all because Rickey performed mental surgery on Dotson. Other than Kingman and Rickey tattooing Dotson’s face, Oakland never even got a hit in the inning.
Nobody on the Chicago bench was more enraged than La Russa. The next night, Rickey was chopping it up with another East Bay legend, White Sox leadoff man Rudy Law, who was grim-faced.
“He tells me, ‘Rickey, Tony held a meeting, and the meeting wasn’t about the fight. It was all about you.’ And I was like, ‘Me? It wasn’t about the team, or Kingman?’ Rudy said, ‘No, it was all about getting you.’
“OK, so now, it’s fight day. And I said to everybody, ‘If anything happens, I better see everybody out there, or after I’m done whipping their ass, anyone on our team I see on the bench or slow to get out there, I’m whipping your asses, too.'”
Just before the first pitch, Rickey had one last message to deliver.
“I run over to their dugout and I say to Tony, ‘If anything happens out there today, I’m not coming to the mound for the pitcher. I’m coming straight here, right to the dugout — to get you.'”
La Russa and Rickey would win a championship together in that great year of 1989 and an American League pennant in 1990. In between, the two massive personalities would clash. La Russa was convinced that Rickey’s personality prevented him from being even greater.
It was a common sentiment, and it was true: Rickey Henderson understood the lessons of American capitalism better than his teachers. Money was the mode of currency to express all things — value, appreciation, power — and if anyone had more than he, they had better have the résumé to prove it. Even if they did, that might not be enough.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Rickey would withhold his services if he felt the game was treating him unfairly — even when he was in the wrong, like the years he took the security of a long-term contract and then fumed when annual free agent deals would exceed his own.
The constant sparring over money convinced La Russa that Henderson, in his words, “wasn’t a great player.” Talented, yes. Game-changing, yes. But to La Russa, great players never allowed anything to come before winning, and Rickey did.
And yet Rickey went from one of the most disliked players in the game to one of the most beloved over the course of his career, in large part because of his flamboyant personality and style. Whether the Rickey stories were true or not stopped being the point. Even Rickey would begin to admit to stories that never happened because the legend was more important than the facts. The legends live on.
One story, which was definitely true, articulated Rickey’s arc. It occurred May 30, 1994, with the A’s making their first trip of the season to Toronto. The team bus left the Toronto Sheraton, rolled down Spadina Avenue, and as it rumbled to the SkyDome, it past a billboard on Blue Jays Way containing just three elements: a photo of an elated Joe Carter, the date of his epic home run, and the time it landed in the seats to give Toronto the championship in 1993. No other words.
The billboard sparked a question that bounced around the A’s bus as it pulled into the ballpark: “Where were you when Joe Carter hit the home run?” From the front to the back, players, coaches, and staff recalled their whereabouts during Canada’s most famous baseball moment. Dave Feldman, the statistician for KRON-TV, the A’s television affiliate, said he was sitting on the couch, watching the game in his San Francisco apartment, totally stunned. More voices followed, with more recollections.
Then, a lone voice boomed from the very back of the bus.
“I was on second base!”
It was Rickey.
The only thing that did more for Rickey’s reputation than his hilarity was his sheer dominance. “Rickey was great, sure, but when Rickey put his nose in it — those days when he really wanted to play — there was nobody better,” Eckersley said.
Like the time in 1998, when Rickey was close to done. He was 39, and his manager, Art Howe, lamented that Rickey couldn’t get around on a fastball anymore. As proof, he would strike out 118 times that year, the most ever in a single season for him. That meant he was vulnerable, and the youngsters thought they could take him out.
“One time we were in Cleveland, and Kenny Lofton was leading the league in stolen bases,” recalled Ron Washington, the A’s third base coach at the time. “And here’s Lofton across the diamond chirping at Rickey: ‘See that old man on the other side of the field? There’s a new sheriff in town. That dude is done.’ And don’t you know, Rickey just went on a tear. Second — gone. Third — gone. He’d come back into the dugout and say, ‘If Rickey sleep, let Rickey sleep.’ He just took whatever he wanted. When you talked s— to him the way Kenny Lofton did, he reminded you that he was still Rickey Henderson.”
When it all coalesced into a titanic career, even La Russa had to reassess.
“Rickey knew his body better than anybody else,” La Russa later told me. “I have to admit I was wrong about him. As a manager, I would ask him how he felt and he would tell me, ’70 percent.’ Seventy percent wasn’t good enough for him to play, but I’d tell him 70 percent of Rickey Henderson was better than 100 percent of anybody else I had on the bench. There were times he did not play even when that 70 percent, I thought, could have benefited the team, but when you look at the end results of what he did, the totality of his career achievements cannot be argued.”
His detractors were not completely wrong. Rickey was difficult. Rickey was a force of his own making, for better and, for a manager, often for worse — especially when he saw himself as underpaid. But if the games are about numbers, as we are told they are, Rickey Henderson stood vindicated, and in the end, that is why he was loved.
“Tell me something,” he once said to me during a discussion over malingering. “How in the hell you gonna steal 1,400 bases jaking it? How could you do what I did, for as long as I did it, and say I didn’t want to be out there?”
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Ryan McGee
ROCKINGHAM, N.C. — This time around, it feels different. Everyone around Rockingham, North Carolina, says so.
Man, I hope so.
They said it in 2018, when a man nearly no one in Richmond County had heard of bought the dilapidated Rockingham Speedway and promised a resurrection. They said it three years later, when North Carolina government officials set aside $50 million to do much-needed work on the Tar Heel State’s big three racetracks. They said it when $9 million of that cash was used to repave Rockingham. They repeated it one year ago, when NASCAR announced that two of its national series would spend Easter weekend 2025 at The Rock. And this week, the people of Rockingham have gleefully reiterated their hopes that, yes, this time is indeed much, much different, as they have watched the team haulers of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck and Xfinity series roll through their town of 9,000, turn up U.S. Highway 1, and churn northbound through the Carolina Sandhills for a Friday/Saturday doubleheader.
A pair of races held on a 1.017-mile oval that refuses to die, once again emerging from that sand like a mummy wrapped in 200 mph duct tape.
“I was born here, have spent my entire life here, and when the racetrack is empty, something is missing from all of us,” says Bryan Land, a sixth-generation Richmond County native. As a kid, he worked in the kitchen of the Rockingham Speedway infield diner located at the entrance of the garage, feeding scrambled eggs and cheeseburgers to the likes of Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty. As an adult, he serves as county manager for Richmond County, and has found himself back in that same infield. He has been there every night this week, as he was at 8 o’clock on Tuesday night, offering up whatever needs to be done to ensure the racetrack is at its best this weekend. “The excitement we all feel right now is very real. Because that hole we’ve all had, it’s being filled. And yes, it does feel different this time around.”
Like Land, I too was born in Rockingham, in a hospital straight back down that highway in the middle of town, 12 minutes south of the track. Now, it’s just a clinic. But back in the day, I came screaming into the world about two weeks before Cale Yarborough won the American 500. My dad, who’d been a father for all of 13 days, was in the pits at The Rock as a gas can man for Dave Marcis in his No. 30 Lunda Construction Dodge.
I’ve spent decades looking for a pic of my Dad as gas can man for Dave Marcis in the Carolinas, late ’60s/early ’70s. Did a NASCAR Classics YouTube deep dive today and got a screengrab from ’72 Carolina 500 at Rockingham, ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Pretty sure he’s in there. pic.twitter.com/Q59Srp7utL
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) February 25, 2025
I’ll be buried in Rockingham, too. I know exactly where the plot is, in the family cemetery, located about 15 miles west of the track.
My point is that this race weekend and what it might mean is personal.
It’s been personal before, during Rockingham’s other flirtations with renewed racing life. It felt good then, too, but it didn’t feel as it does now. Different. Solid. Supported. Like it’s destined to work this time.
For those who do not know — and based on this timeline, there are likely many — a history lesson.
The Rockingham Speedway was opened in 1965, then known as the North Carolina Motor Speedway. It was built through the efforts of Bill Land, Bryan Land’s grandfather, and Harold Brasington, the same man who 15 years earlier had famously gone full “Field of Dreams” and bulldozed the Darlington Raceway into a patch of South Carolina peanut fields just a short drive south from Rockingham. His efforts in Richmond County resulted in a smaller but similarly quirky oval, one that raced like a short track/superspeedway hybrid.
Over the next four decades, the track that became known as “The Rock” hosted 78 NASCAR Cup Series races. Most of those seasons featured two events per year, one very early, often following the Daytona 500, and the other so late on the calendar that it became the place where championships were clinched by everyone from Earnhardt and Yarborough to Benny Parsons, based in nearby Ellerbe, and Jeff Gordon, who’d turned his very first stock car laps at Rockingham under the tutelage of NASCAR Hall of Famer Buck Baker.
In 2001, Rockingham hosted the first race following the death of Earnhardt, the tiny Eastern North Carolina town descended upon by media members from around the globe, all there to see Steve Park, in a car owned by Earnhardt, earn one of the most emotional NASCAR wins ever witnessed.
But as NASCAR became chic, it began ripping its roots from the ground to go hunting for more money elsewhere. During the racetrack-building boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rockingham ownership changed frequently and it became a bargaining chip in an antitrust lawsuit between shareholders of Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports Incorporated (SMI) and NASCAR. In 2003, The Rock’s spring date was moved out west to the California Speedway. One year later, Smith moved the fall race to his still-new show palace, the Texas Motor Speedway.
With the exception of lawn mowers and an occasional movie shoot (“Au revoir, Ricky Bobby …”), Rockingham was silent. The sight of the place jailed in chains and padlocks with no chance for parole was so painful that local residents took to using alternate routes up to Southern Pines just to avoid having to look at it.
I know because I was one of them.
Hope retuned in 2008, when grassroots racer Andy Hillenburg, with backing from local officials, purchased the racetrack when Smith unloaded it at auction, saving it from a slew of salvage and scrap metal companies. For five years, Hillenburg ground it out. He opened up the track as a test facility, even building a Martinsville clone behind the big oval’s backstretch. He brought in ARCA and an alphabet soup of late model series, races won by the fresh-faced likes of Joey Logano and Chase Elliott. Ever heard of them?
In 2012, the Trucks came to town. Kasey Kahne won the first event amid an electric, feel-good atmosphere and large crowd, exacting some Rock revenge after losing the track’s final Cup race in ’04 to Matt Kenseth by a scant .010 seconds, Kahne’s second-ever Cup start.
The following year, Kyle Larson won a second Trucks race. But this time, it felt different in a bad sort of way. Something felt, well, off. The crowd wasn’t nearly as big as ’12. The trash cans were overflowing. Many of the toilets didn’t work. My lasting image of that day is of Hillenburg, only hours before the green flag, in a golf cart, frantically rolling through the parking lots and selling tickets out of his pocket.
Hillenburg is a racer’s racer. He is my friend. I will always be thankful for what he did in Rockingham. But naive business decisions, a short track manager’s mentality, and being crippled by turncoats he’d trusted as friends and business partners left him doomed. By 2013, the place was shuttered again. And, honestly, so were the feelings of hope for the future of The Rock, especially as the years clicked by and that harsh geology of Richmond County literally sandblasted every strip of metal, rubber and wood that it could find.
“It just got so quiet, man,” Land said on Wednesday night. “Anything you’d hear, anything, rumors or truth, you’d hope it was for real.”
Land’s emotion echoes that of everyone I have talked to back home in the past several months, especially during January’s two-day session to shake the place down with the machines that will race there this weekend.
Whenever I have written about the Rockingham Speedway in the past few decades, my fellow natives and family members have taken issue when I dive into the reasons for the rawness of our emotions when it comes to the racetrack. But it also is what it is. When the place was built in the 1960s, Richmond County was booming. Textile mills cranked out cloth night and day from every corner of Rockingham. The town of Hamlet, birthplace of John Coltrane and a pack of NFL players, was an East Coast railroad hub. By the 1980s, all of that was gone, having moved overseas or up the coast.
But the Speedway remained. No matter where in the world a Rockingham resident traveled, when someone asked where we were from and you told them, their immediate response was, “that’s the place with the NASCAR track!”
The Rock wasn’t just a part of our identity. It was our identity. So, when that was stripped away, it felt every bit as devastating as the loss of the mills and the railroad. Only, those left in trickles. This happened via a news release, a sheet of fax paper that might as well have been a wrecking ball.
When Dan Lovenheim bought the place in 2018, he openly questioned what he’d done. Every single time he opened a door or unlocked a building or room, all he found was rust and rot.
“It was probably way worse than anyone realizes, even if they had been there and seen it and thought they knew,” he explained when the track’s race dates were announced by NASCAR one year ago.
Lovenheim made his money by transforming a dead zone of nearby Raleigh into a series of nightclub hot spots. That was a lot of work. He thought.
“Oh, that was nothing compared to what we were looking at here at the racetrack,” he said. “But we tried to be patient and take it all one problem at a time.”
When the state earmarked the money to help revive its racetracks three years later, the headliner quickly became North Wilkesboro Speedway, which had been abandoned by NASCAR and Smith in 1996. Thanks to the work of Dale Earnhardt Jr., iRacing and the kinder, gentler resurrection and promotional wizardry of Smith’s son, Marcus, who took over SMI after his father’s death in 2022, the North Wilkesboro comeback to impossibly host the NASCAR All-Star Race was both fast and fascinating. Same for Winston-Salem’s Bowman Gray Stadium, which was upfitted by NASCAR for February’s Clash.
While the auto racing world reveled in what was happening at those two North Carolina bullrings, the folks back home at Rockingham were blowing up my phone, all with the same question: If NASCAR can go back there, why the hell can’t they come back here?!
Now, it is. And it is doing so because Lovenheim is doing what others before him did not. He has hired professionals who specialize in racetrack revivals and race publicity and either done what they tell him to do or simply got out of their way.
Illinois-based Track Enterprises is the outfit that upfit the once-seemingly doomed legendary likes of the Milwaukee Mile and the Nashville Fairgrounds. When I talked to Track Enterprises’ Robert Sargent on Tuesday, he was rolling around The Rock with his checklist, everything from affixing signs to suite doors and the final fastening of $1 million worth of SAFER barriers to the walls, to the trimming of the infield grass and painting every flat surface to be found on the 244-acre grounds. Meanwhile, the state of North Carolina has been plastered with Rock billboards. Last month at Martinsville Speedway, Michael McDowell‘s Cup car carried a livery promoting the Rockingham race weekend.
“This is what we do,” Sargent breathlessly explained, saying he’ll sleep plenty after Easter Sunday, but not much before. “We do it because we love racing, but the best part is seeing what it means to the community. Every time I turn around, there’s a new Rockingham resident standing there, asking what they can do to help. That’s how much they care.”
So, Mr. Sargent, how do you respond?
“I’ll take all the help I can get. But I also tell them the best thing they can do for us is to enjoy the race weekend. Take it all in. That’s why we are here.”
By all indications, there are plenty who are taking him up on that offer. Saturday’s Xfinity race is already being touted as a sellout with more than 26,000 tickets purchased (although they’ll find somewhere for you if you show up, trust me) and the promotional push has shifted to Friday afternoon’s Trucks race.
Now the question many are asking, back home and everywhere else for that matter, is where does that push go from here? If this Rockingham comeback weekend takes the checkered flag without any significant issues, could the Cup Series return? For a Clash? For an All-Star Race? Maybe even for a 79th points-paying event? NASCAR executive vice president Ben Kennedy, great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France and the man behind the sanctioning body’s willingness to try so many new and old scheduling ideas in recent seasons, has recently hinted that this weekend might very well be an audition for the old oval on the side of U.S. 1.
It was on April 23, 1965, that Bryan Land’s grandfather and Harold Brasington announced they would host their first NASCAR event later that fall. Almost 60 years to the day, their track will be busy once again.
“It’s hard not to think about the possibilities for the future,” Land said as he was about to head back out once again to check on the track. “But right now I think we all are just excited to see racing at The Rock this weekend. I think everyone is. Because we weren’t sure it was going to happen again. We’ve been here before. But this time …”
It feels different?
“Yes, sir. And that feels good.”
LAS VEGAS — Former NASCAR star Tony Stewart won the NHRA 4-Wide Nationals on Sunday for his first career Top Fuel victory.
The 53-year-old Stewart had a winning run of 3.870 seconds at 317.42 mph at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He held off Antron Brown at the finish, and also beat Justin Ashley and Jasmine Salinas in the final.
“You sure as hell appreciate it more when you struggle like we did,” said Stewart, who won the NASCAR Cup Series championships as a driver in both 2002 and 2005.
“All the credit goes to this team. I’m so proud of my guys. There’s so many great partners here and I have a great team standing there. I have a feeling I’m really going to be hurting in the morning, but it sure as hell is going to be worth it.”
Austin Prock topped the Funny Car field and Dallas Glenn won in Pro Stock.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Three weeks into the new MLB season, there’s a new No. 1 on our list.
After being a unanimous choice atop our preseason rankings, the Los Angeles Dodgers have fallen from the top spot thanks to a recent rough patch (by their standards) combined with the strong performances of other National League powerhouses.
Was it the New York Mets, San Diego Padres or San Francisco Giants who replaced the defending champions atop our Week 3 Power Rankings? Which other teams off to surprising starts surged up our list? And who took the biggest April tumbles?
Our expert panel has combined to rank every team based on a combination of what we’ve seen so far and what we already knew going into the 162-game marathon that is a full baseball season. We also asked ESPN MLB experts Jorge Castillo, Buster Olney and Jesse Rogers to weigh in with an observation for all 30 teams.
Week 2 | Week 1 | Preseason rankings
Record: 15-4
Previous ranking: 3
San Diego finally lost at home this week, but the Padres’ advantage at Petco Park shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s become a more raucous environment than ever, a destination for fans who want to see a pitching staff that so far has compiled the lowest home ERA in the game and a lineup that ranks eighth in home OPS. Fernando Tatis Jr., in particular, must like the sight lines there this year; he has an OPS over 1.100 at Petco Park. San Diego has established a home environment all smaller market teams should strive for, and the Padres are winning plenty to keep fans coming back for more. — Rogers
Record: 14-6
Previous ranking: 1
How much fun is Tommy Edman? Through Tuesday’s games, he is tied for the major league lead with six home runs. Yes, even if it’s for a moment in time, Edman has one more long ball than his teammate Shohei Ohtani, all while playing solid defense, both at second base and center field. Edman led the Dodgers last week with an OPS over .900 while Ohtani was experiencing a mini slump, especially during a weekend series loss to the Cubs. Edman remained hot with a four-hit performance against Colorado on Tuesday. He has yet to go hitless in consecutive games this season. — Rogers
Record: 11-7
Previous ranking: 4
Juan Soto was right: Pete Alonso isn’t Aaron Judge, the best hitter in the world and the American League MVP in two of the past three campaigns. But Alonso has been doing his best impression. The first baseman is slashing .356/.466/.729 with five home runs, 20 RBIs and 11 walks to 10 strikeouts hitting behind Soto through Tuesday. Alonso’s 1.195 OPS and 242 OPS+ lead the National League. His hard-hit rate is in the 100th percentile. His average exit velocity and barrel rate sit in the 99th percentile. He already has posted more than half of his fWAR total from last season (1.3 to 2.1). Opponents have mostly opted to pitch around Soto and attack Alonso, but that changed in Minnesota this week when Soto clubbed home runs on consecutive days. It makes for a dangerous recipe. — Castillo
Record: 13-5
Previous ranking: 8
The Giants are rolling, thanks in part to outfielder Jung Hoo Lee. He seems to be coming into his own during his second season in San Francisco, highlighted by a two-homer performance in New York over the weekend. He leads the league in doubles (10) while slugging .647. One thing he is doing particularly well is not letting mistake pitches get by him; instead, he is doing max damage on those pitches, hence all the slug. He already has more than double the number of extra-base hits this season in less than half the at-bats he had all of last year. — Rogers
Record: 10-8
Previous ranking: 2
Alec Bohm notched four hits and a walk in the Phillies’ first two games this season. In 15 games since, the third baseman has gone 8-for-64 with one extra-base hit (a double) and zero walks, an icy stretch that dropped him to eighth in the batting order against the Giants this week. Bohm enjoyed a breakout first half last season, which resulted in his first All-Star nod. But he stumbled down the stretch, culminating in getting benched in the NLDS against the Mets and rampant trade rumors over the offseason. Bohm is batting .228 with four home runs and a .599 OPS in 65 games since the start of last season’s second half. Continued struggles could result in less playing time with Edmundo Sosa pushing for more starts. — Castillo
Record: 12-9
Previous ranking: 6
Losing pitcher Justin Steele to a season-ending elbow injury is a tough early blow. The Cubs do have some pitching depth, but no one as reliable as Steele is. Replacements for the role include veteran right-hander Colin Rea — he threw 3⅔ shutout innings against the Dodgers on Sunday — and young left-hander Jordan Wicks.
Highly touted pitching prospect Cade Horton could also find his way to the majors in the coming month and Chicago’s front office will hit the phone lines as well, calling on potential trade targets like Marlins star Sandy Alcantara. For now, though, expect the Cubs to look inward. — Rogers
Record: 11-7
Previous ranking: 5
The Yankees’ starting rotation, a projected strength entering spring training, has been a weakness after injuries to Gerrit Cole, Luis Gil and Clarke Schmidt gutted the group. The rotation’s 4.98 ERA through Tuesday was the third-worst mark in the majors. Max Fried has pitched as advertised, posting a 1.88 ERA in his four starts, but Will Warren’s 5.14 ERA ranks second. Schmidt’s return from a shoulder injury this week should bolster the rotation, but the Yankees need Carlos Rodon (5.48 ERA, 12 walks in 23 innings across four starts) to be better in the third year of his six-year, $162 million contract. — Castillo
Record: 11-7
Previous ranking: 10
Offense, offense, offense. Arizona is becoming known for a relentless attack. After leading the majors in run scoring last season, the Diamondbacks are off to a hot start again, just behind the Cubs as the second-most prolific team in the NL. Outfielder Corbin Carroll is back to the elite form he displayed when he was named Rookie of the Year in 2023. And he has carried over a hot finish to 2024, hitting a league-leading six home runs, including a grand slam in Miami on Tuesday. Carroll’s output has helped mitigate the loss of second baseman Ketel Marte, who should be back soon. There’s no reason not to believe the D-backs’ offense will continue to lead them all year. — Rogers
Record: 10-8
Previous ranking: 12
Kerry Carpenter clubbed 18 homers in 264 at-bats last season, and then hit a memorable three-run homer against Emmanuel Clase in the postseason. Opposing managers have been saving left-handed relievers to face him, but here is some bad news for the opposition — the left-handed slugger’s production is climbing against lefties, too. He’s got two homers off lefties this season, which is one more than he had all of 2024. — Olney
Record: 11-7
Previous ranking: 7
If all you looked at were the offensive numbers, the Rangers’ record would make zero sense. Three key guys — Marcus Semien, Joc Pederson and Jake Burger — all carry on-base percentages of .220 or lower, and the deep lineup of mashers really hasn’t come together yet. But the starting pitching has been really good, with Texas’ rotation ERA of 3.45 ranked seventh in the majors.
Bruce Bochy noted in a text the progression of the pitching — Jacob deGrom still refining his command, Nathan Eovaldi and Tyler Mahle have thrown well, and the hope is that Jack Leiter — “really impressive,” Bochy wrote — is past his blister issue and will rejoin the rotation. — Olney
Record: 9-8
Previous ranking: 22
It’s too soon to know whether Emmanuel Clase’s brutal start is temporary, but the struggle is real right now. He has already allowed more earned runs (6) than he did for the entire 2024 regular season, and he surrendered 15 hits in eight innings. As he dominated hitters last year, Clase pitched with precision, but so far this year, his raw stuff seems flat and he’s just leaving a lot over the middle of the zone. Interestingly, his first-pitch strike rate is a career-high 75.7%, and it’s fair to wonder if he’s throwing too many strikes. — Olney
Record: 8-10
Previous ranking: 16
Junior Caminero homered in three straight games and compiled three hits in another over the past week. But lesser-known Jonathan Aranda has been the Rays’ best hitter — and the best hitter against right-handed pitching across the sport. The 26-year-old first baseman entered Wednesday leading the majors in batting average (.413), slugging (.761), and OPS (1.242) facing almost exclusively right-handers in 15 games. And the underlying numbers suggest the production isn’t a fluke: He ranks in the 96th percentile or better across the majors in barrel rate, hard-hit rate and average exit velocity among other categories. Aranda is 0-for-4 with two walks in seven plate appearances against left-handed pitchers so he’s likely to remain a platoon player for now, but he is capitalizing on his chances against righties after an injury-plagued 2024 season postponed his breakout. — Castillo
Record: 11-8
Previous ranking: 17
For a team with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Anthony Santander, the Blue Jays have not hit the ball over the wall very often. Toronto’s 11 home runs through Tuesday were tied for the second-lowest total in baseball. Toronto’s 12 home runs through Wednesday are tied for the third-lowest total in baseball. Guerrero didn’t hit his first homer until Toronto’s 19th game Wednesday when he crushed a hanging slider from Spencer Strider. Bo Bichette is still looking for his first long ball.
Andres Giménez, who hit nine home runs last season in Cleveland, leads the club with three. Santander, who clubbed 44 home runs for the Orioles in 2024, went 15 games before homering as a Blue Jay. And yet Toronto is over .500 — a great sign for a club looking to rebound from last season’s last-place finish. — Castillo
Record: 10-10
Previous ranking: 9
Boston’s lineup is as deep as any in baseball on paper, but it has been a boom-or-bust unit so far. On Tuesday, for example, Alex Bregman went 5-for-5 with a double and two home runs in a 7-4 win over the Rays. Before that, the Red Sox were held to four or fewer runs in eight straight games after an 18-run explosion against the Cardinals on April 6. Boston has scored one run in five games and been limited to three or fewer runs in 11 games through Tuesday. It’s why they emerged from Tuesday’s win one game below .500. — Castillo
Record: 9-9
Previous ranking: 19
Julio Rodriguez isn’t on top of any American League leaderboard, but within the context of league-wide pitching dominance, he’s actually doing more at the plate early this season than he has in the past. His wRC+ is 113 and his patience at the plate has been striking: He already has drawn 11 bases on balls, with a walk rate that doubles that of last season. “He’s been as aggressive as he’s always been, especially early in the count,” said Jerry Dipoto, the Mariners’ head of baseball operations. “But the biggest difference to me is that he gets himself dialed back in.” — Olney
Record: 8-11
Previous ranking: 14
The Kansas City offense has a collective slash line of .206/.274/.308, but at the very least, Bobby Witt Jr. is hitting. He’s 10-for-20 over his past six games, with three walks and four strikeouts. The lack of production from the outfielders continues to be an issue: The Royals’ outfielders have a wRC+ of 51, which seems impossibly low. They had two homers in 187 plate appearances. In a related note, star prospect Jac Caglianone has a .290/.356/.579 slash line in Double-A, with all of his starts at first base. — Olney
Record: 9-9
Previous ranking: 20
The Reds finally pushed past the .500 mark earlier this week behind the strength of a pitching staff that dominated during a four-game win streak, surrendering just 16 hits in 36 innings. They allowed just nine runs (2.25 ERA) over that time frame with a minuscule 0.81 WHIP. Hunter Greene and Andrew Abbott shined in the rotation while the bullpen, led by righty Emilio Pagan, was stellar. — Rogers
Record: 5-13
Previous ranking: 15
Not much has gone right for the Braves so far in 2025, but Spencer Strider‘s season debut against the Blue Jays on Wednesday qualifies as a resounding positive. Besides giving up an RBI single and a solo home run to Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the right-hander held the Blue Jays in check over five-plus innings in his first major league start in more than a year. Strider finished with 10 strikeouts, including a vintage three-pitch strikeout of Bo Bichette to begin the outing, and became the fastest starting pitcher to 500 career strikeouts. He walked two, limited Toronto to three hits and threw 97 pitches. Most importantly, he looked uninhibited. — Castillo
Record: 10-9
Previous ranking: 18
Are the Brewers this year’s Jekyll and Hyde? They’re all over the place, giving up seven or more runs in a third of their games while also compiling four shutouts, second most in baseball. Their latest shutout came thanks to recent pickup Quinn Priester. Milwaukee acquired him from the Red Sox a week into the season — usually marking an inventory/depth addition — but Priester could end up being the move of the year. He has given up just one earned run in two starts: a solid performance at hitter-friendly Coors Field last week followed by five shutout innings against the Tigers on Tuesday. Milwaukee is looking for some consistency on the mound. Could Priester provide it? — Rogers
Record: 7-10
Previous ranking: 11
Orioles general manager Mike Elias met with reporters Tuesday and maintained he believes his club is a playoff team. Baltimore then lost to the Guardians to fall to 6-10. The Orioles’ offense, rightly heralded for its premier young talent, has been inconsistent, but that should improve. The bigger problem is the starting pitching. The Orioles’ rotation ranks last in the majors in ERA. Zach Eflin, Grayson Rodriguez and Albert Suarez, all projected starters during spring training, are on the injured list while Kyle Bradish isn’t expected to return from Tommy John surgery until the second half. Starting pitching was the concern entering the season after Baltimore failed to replace Corbin Burnes with another front-line starter. And it has so far played out as expected. — Castillo
Record: 8-10
Previous ranking: 13
Jim Crane’s instinct will be to hold his team together and push to make the playoffs for the ninth season in a row, and for the 10th time in the last 11 years. But without Kyle Tucker and Alex Bregman, the challenges are greater. Yordan Alvarez is off to a slow start, and the AL West is more competitive than it was a season ago.
If the Astros do drift from contention, there will be teams calling on Framber Valdez, who will be eligible for free agency in the fall. The Tucker trade seemed to signal a greater willingness to identify deals that will help to turn over the roster and build around the likes of Hunter Brown, Yainer Diaz and Cam Smith. — Olney
Record: 9-8
Previous ranking: 21
The Angels are the AL’s biggest surprise so far, and given their struggles of last season, you could understand why rival executives aren’t buying in yet. But there are ways in which the team is clearly distinguishing itself from the ’24 edition, and of course, that starts with the right fielder.
“Mike Trout is still Mike Trout and as long as we have his presence, we have a chance,” manager Ron Washington wrote in a text.
Washington also noted that the youngest Angels are benefitting from the experience of last year – Nolan Schanuel has an .856 OPS, Kyren Paris is impressing and Logan O’Hoppe has an early-season OPS near 1.000. — Olney
Record: 9-9
Previous ranking: 23
Even with Ivan Herrera missing time with a knee injury, Cardinals catchers still lead the league with six home runs and a lofty .329 batting average through Tuesday. Backups Pedro Pages and Yohel Pozo have held their own in Herrera’s absence. Pozo made headlines after coming up from Triple-A as he collected five hits — including two doubles and a home run — in his first three games. The longtime minor leaguer had not seen time in the majors since 2021 when he played in 21 games for the Texas Rangers. Over 1,000 minor league games later, he’s been an unexpected surprise in St. Louis. — Rogers
Record: 7-12
Previous ranking: 24
What is happening in Minnesota is the worst-case scenario — a slow start for a team that did very little to improve over the winter after failing to make the playoffs last season. Carlos Correa and Byron Buxton are both batting under .200, at a time when Royce Lewis is on the injured list, and Bailey Ober and Chris Paddack have allowed 26 earned runs in 29 1/3 innings. The weather is always an early-season X factor for the Twins, but hey, a lot of teams have had to play in brutal conditions in the first weeks, and only two AL teams have a worse run differential so far. — Olney
Record: 8-9
Previous ranking: 28
Who had the rebuilding Marlins playing .500 ball through 16 games this season? The team’s relative success probably won’t last much longer, but Miami has held its own through 10% of the regular season.
First baseman Matt Mervis is fueling the offense with five home runs and a 1.009 OPS through Tuesday. Shortstop Xavier Edwards, coming off an impressive 70-game sample last season, is batting over .300 again. Right-hander Max Meyer was impressive in his first three starts, holding opponents to four earned runs across 18 innings.
Chances are the Marlins will sink back down to the basement of the loaded NL East, but this start constitutes a step in the right direction. — Castillo
Record: 8-10
Previous ranking: 25
The early returns on the ballpark in Sacramento are that it’s like Coors Field California. The A’s have the worst home-field ERA, at 5.89, and the 1.56 home runs allowed per game is the fourth-worst ratio in the big leagues. Or maybe those numbers are rooted in a small-sample size of rough pitching performances. — Olney
Record: 7-11
Previous ranking: 26
How bad has the Nationals’ bullpen been this season? Bad enough for manager Dave Martinez to summon his relievers to his office for a meeting before Tuesday’s game against the Pirates. Two Nationals relievers then combined to toss two scoreless innings in a 3-0 win, which qualifies as significant progress for a group that ranks last in the majors in ERA (7.21) and WHIP (1.89). — Castillo
Record: 7-12
Previous ranking: 27
Stop us if you’re heard this one before: The Pirates are having trouble scoring runs. It’s a rinse-and-repeat scenario for the Buccos, who hit just .185 as a team last week (which, incredibly, was not the lowest batting average in MLB). That was low enough to help produce a 2-5 record for Pittsburgh, which sits in last place in the NL Central. The Pirates’ overall team OPS ranks last in the NL and 29th in baseball, and that puts a tremendous strain on their young pitching staff. — Rogers
Record: 4-13
Previous ranking: 30
Andrew Vaughn has generated some ugly numbers so far this season, with a .131 batting average and two home runs in his first 61 at-bats. But the White Sox feel like he’s actually swung the bat better than those numbers indicate — Vaughn is hitting just .132 on balls in play, and he is 54th among 132 hitters in adjusted exit velocity. Whether Vaughn’s early production has been nicked by bad weather, or bad luck, the White Sox anticipate better days ahead for the first baseman. — Olney
Record: 3-15
Previous ranking: 29
Let’s try to find one positive thing about the Rockies, who went 1-7 over the course of the week, from last Tuesday to this one. Here it is: In their lone win — a 7-2 victory over Milwaukee last Thursday — outfielder Brenton Doyle went 4-for-5 with five runs driven in while scoring twice. Doyle, just 26, has an OPS over .900 (through Tuesday) that includes three home runs and a batting average over .300. See? It can be done. It just takes some looking to find the good in Colorado. A younger group of players might provide more positives this summer, but it won’t show up in the standings any time soon. — Rogers
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